Carla del Ponte’s allegations that Albanians slaughtered Serbs for their organs aren’t the first to surface about Serbs being used in medical mischief. According to the 2003 statement below, Croatians did it too, in addition to draining Serbs of blood for their Serb-killing paramilitary machine. Vukovar, Croatia, 1991:

Among the gravest crimes committed in the Vukovar Hospital…is involuntary blood taking from Serb civilians, who were for this particular purpose forcefully brought into the hospital by the members of the ZNG [Croatia’s self-styled “National Militia” guilty of countless crimes aginst Serb civilians and POWs ]…

The victims were brought in — usually from various shelters or prisons, where they were held hostages — to the transfusion department of the Vukovar Hospital or to one of its improvised outpatient departments…

Some of [the Serbs] were apprehended at the order of Jastreb, commander of Croatian armed forces in Vukovar, and kept in custody in the ZNG military police prison in the basement of the city hall building until a wounded Croatian soldier would need a transfusion of a particular blood group.

Blood was forcefully taken usually from those Serbs whose blood type was O Rh-negative. According to the testimony of hospital personnel, at least 450 ml of blood was taken from them, so that many experienced serious health problems afterwards.
…
Dr. Vesna Bosanac was traded in a prisoner exchange after the fall of Vukovar. Dr. Bosanac was accused of the murder of numerous Serbian patients under her care, whose blood was deliberately drained and given to wounded HV Croatian soldiers. Upon their death, the vital organs of these Serbian patients were removed and sold on the black market in Germany. Eyewitnesses have come forward to testify to these facts.

Ironically, not only has Dr. Bosanac not been charged with war crimes, she is one of the tribunal’s chief witnesses!

In the past, Croatian readers have asked me to address the “Vukovar Massacre”, which is how they — much like Bosnian Muslims on the subject of Srebrenica — depict what happened to Croatians in Vukovar once the Yugoslav Army got the upper hand and a battle ensued. In particular, Croatians decry that the mostly Serb Yugoslav soldiers didn’t exclude the above-referenced hospital from the gun battle. But the above-cited report (along with numerous other sources) explains that the Croatian soldiers/killers ran into the hospital to hide among civilians and patients:

In late 1991, the Yugoslav Army captured the city of Vukovar from Croatian forces who had been systematically ethnically cleansing the Serb minority in the city…A Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy article in London in December 1992 said “At least 1,000 Serbs, mostly women, old people and children, were shot, knifed, axed or bludgeoned to death systematically one-by-one, in two main centres…One visiting Croat female journalist during the Vukovar fighting, unfamiliar with firearms, asked one of the young gunmen to cock a pistol for her so that she could feel what it was like to kill a Serb. She shot, indiscriminately, an old Serb woman who was standing under Croat guard.”

In November 1991, the Toronto Star said that “a photographer reported seeing black plastic bags containing pieces of the bodies of children about 5, 6, or 7 years old.” When Serb forces broke through and discovered the grisly scenes, Croatian soldiers, in an attempt to escape justice, fled to the protection of the Vukovar hospital and became patients.

I’ve acquired some photographs of the dead Serbs of Vukovar and nearby Gospic (where just last year cafes were using sugar packets with Hitler’s image and Holocaust jokes on them). These are the photos you won’t see on the walls of Holocaust museums because they’re simply too gruesome, and because most of the museums guard the real story about the 1990s ‘genocides’ as carefully as the governments that subsidize them. For there can be no Serb “victims”. These killings were in 1991, shortly before the U.S. stepped in to help Croatian fascist revivalists kill more Serbs — as we continue to do today in Kosovo. The photos appeared in the March 1993 issue of the now defunct British magazine Living Marxism, my convergence with whom I explained here. The article was titled “Hidden side of the Yugoslav war: the pictures they don’t want you to see”, and explained:

The British government has banned an exhibition of photographs showing atrocities committed against Serbs in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia…under sanctions imposed on Serbia by the United Nations. Croatian and Muslim groups from the former Yugoslavia have been allowed to stage their own exhibitions of atrocity photographs in Britain without hindrance.

Living Marxism takes no side in the Yugoslav conflict. But we have sought to expose the distorted way in which this war has been presented to people in the West. In particular, we have opposed the dishonest campaign to demonise and scapegoat the Serbs…

Original captions by Living Marxism preserved:

As Croatian forces withdrew from Vukovar on 15 and 16 November 1991, they dragged Serbian civilians from the cellars where they were hiding, and massacred them. These Serbs were axed to death in a courtyard, after being dragged from the cellar at 74 Nikola Demonja Street in Borovo-naselje, near Vukovar [Names, courtesy of the 4international blog: Radosav Pavic and Velimir Trajkovic (both wearing red); Zorica Pavlovic, her brother Zoran, mother Nada and Milojka Pavlovic.]

This three-year old Serbian boy was shot dead while hiding in the cellar at 72 Nikola Demonja Street. His mother and father, Sladana and Miroslav Cecavac, were also killed [From 4international: “This 3 year old Serbian child was labelled a ‘Serbian aggressor’ by [wartime Croatian president] Tudjman’s…government and the Western corporate-controlled media. In order to stop his so-called ‘aggression’, the so-called ‘brave’ Croatian neo-Ustashe soldiers put a bullet in the back of his head, which exited from the front of his skull. In the war in Croatia and Bosnia, by mid-1994, 7,000 Serbian children were killed: twice as many as Croatian and Muslim children combined…(From: The Suppressed Serbian Voice And The Free Press In America By William Dorich, 1994 - p 30)]

Between 16 and 18 October 1991, 24 Serbian civilians from Gospic in Croatia were slaughtered. Croatian forces killed the 15 men and nine women with guns, knives and sledgehammers, doused the bodies with petrol and set them on fire. From October 1991 to February 1992, more than 500 Serbian civilians from the Gospic area disappeared without a trace

Mira Kalanj, a Serbian civilian from Gospic in Croatia, was killed and burned by Croatian forces between 16 and 18 October 1991. Her husband, Duro, was machine-gunned in the back and then burned (Inset caption: A family photograph of Mira and Duro Kalanj with the eldest of their two sons)

A Serbian girl, suffocated to death in PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) and stuffed in a mechanic’s pit, Borovo-naselje, November 1991

A closer look at how the people in the first photo above were killed (below photos provided by a friend of the photographer who took them):

In supplement to these photos is some context for the Serb-killing orgy in Croatia that started in 1991 (exactly 50 years after Hitler founded the Independent State of Croatia in 1941), and continued into 1995. It comes via a recently started blog in Australia, named 4international.com, which has additional photos and information from those years.

In battles between Croatian HVO forces and the Serbian Chetniks in the Krajina region on September 1, 1991, both sides took 3 prisoners each from their opponents. On September 3, 1991, in a trade of prisoners, the Serbians returned three captured Croatian HVO troops in exchange for three Serbian Chetnik troops. Little did the Serbians know that the three live Croatians were being traded for three dead Serbs. One of the bodies was brutally beaten, stabbed dozens of times, the toes cut off, the left leg broken. Evidence obtained in autopsy indicated that vital organs were missing, corroborating the Serbian claim that vital organs of victims were being sold on the black market in Germany. Video footage of one of the three victims was shown on German and Zagreb television during the first week of September, 1991, as “conclusive evidence” of the brutal torture and death of Croatian victims at the hands of the Serbs. The English translation of this video footage is believed to be narrated by the American actor, Martin Sheen, and copies of the video were sent to representatives in the American Congress and Senate. Dusan Markovich however, was not a Croatian victim. He was a thirty-two year old Serb, father of one child, with a pregnant wife…

Note: In cases such as those cited by William Dorich above, wherein Serbs have been simply found without organs, please note that when it comes to Croatians leaving Serbs organless, it’s not necessarily done for sale on the black market, since Serb-organ removal is a national Croatian pastime, no profit needed. Witness the hollowed-out bodies after the three-minute mark of this montage, and the Serbian soldier in 1995 Krajina below:

If you’re wondering why the above crimes against Serbs in Vukovar were never officially investigated, keep in mind that even Del Ponte’s allegations were dismissed out of hand by the Hague and UN. Given the history and persistence of anti-Serb bias that permeates media, governments, NGOs, militaries and the entertainment industry, any Balkan observer can almost guarantee that the claims made by Del Ponte and those of the witnesses above aren’t just credible, they’re the tip of the iceberg.

******UPDATE******

I’ve just noticed that in March I got the following, very relevant email from Professor Emeritus John Peter Maher:

In 1994 I talked with soldiers who had fought in the JNA on the Vukovar front. The buddy of one said that he had seen mini-hospitals of Austrian manufacture that were used in harvesting body organs for the transplant market.

[Furthermore]:

Globalization and the trade in human body parts.
From: The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology | Date: 2/1/1999 | Author: Harrison, Trevor.

excerpt

13. Information of another example may yet emerge, however. In October, 1996, Xavier Gautier, a reporter with Le Figaro, was found hung in Menorca. While local officials insisted that it was a suicide, his family claimed that Gautier was investigating alleged trafficking in human body parts during the recent war in Bosnia. Allegedly, prisoners were specially selected and executed, their body parts being sold on the world market in order to purchase weapons. Gautier’s family subsequently handed over an eight-page list of names of people said to be connected with the illegal activity (Edmonton Journal, 1996a). The author is unaware of any further details concerning this story.